Our eyes meet.
She doesn't look away. Most people do. When you catch someone staring, the social contract demands a flinch, a redirect, a manufactured reason to have been looking in your direction. Her gaze stays on mine, and there's something in it I can't quite name.
Not hostility. Not indifference.
Something closer to hunger, but not the predatory kind. The hungry look of someone who hasn't seen something familiar in a long time and can't stop staring at it.
Curiosity, maybe. Recognition, though we've never met.
I hold the eye contact for three seconds, five, seven. Then she tilts her head, just slightly, and the corner of her mouth shifts, acknowledgement bordering on a smile.
She turns and disappears into the residential level.
"Who is that?" I ask a passing worker.
"You don't recognize Elissa Torrence?" he asks. "You must be knew."
"She's a Torrence?"
"She's adopted." He looks at his holo board, searching for something. "Malachar's."
Malachar's adopted daughter. Human. Living in the family quarters of a man who disappeared. And she watched me like I was the most interesting thing she'd seen in months.
"Where are you supposed to be?" He asks me, narrowing his eyes.
I have an excuse ready on my lips, but I'm saved by someone else.
"Talia. Just the person I was hoping to run into." he materializes from a side corridor like he was grown there. Like the station produced him specifically for this moment, pressed and polished and perfectly positioned in my path. He's wearing a charcoal jacket over a dark shirt, the kind of effortless presentation that takes deliberate effort, and his smile is warm. Open. The smile of a man who wants you to feel safe.
It's wrong.
"It's Ethan Eames," he says. "You've met so many people, I'm sure it's a lot to remember."
The worker excuses himself, no longer interested in me.
I can't pinpoint why Ethan leaves me unsettled. The crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the slight asymmetry that makes it look natural, the way it reaches his face at the right speed.
Not too fast, which would read as performance. Not too slow, which would read as calculation. It's perfectly calibrated, and that's exactly the problem. Real smiles aren't perfect.
Real smiles have a flaw somewhere, an edge that doesn't quite meet. A flash of tooth that's a fraction too long.
His has been sanded smooth.
"Ethan." I start walking and he keeps pace with me.
"I heard you've been exploring. Getting the lay of the station." His tone is conversational. Easy. Like we're colleagues passing in a hallway at work. "Smart. Most new arrivals spend the first week in their rooms, too scared to move."
"I'm not most new arrivals."
"No. You're not." He says it like a compliment, and it settles on my skin like a compliment, and I don't trust it. "Your father wasn't most people either. Marcus had a way of seeing systems. Understanding how pieces fit. I see that in you."
My stride almost breaks. Almost. I hold it, but he noticed. I know he noticed because something shifts in his grey-blue eyes, a brief light, there and gone, like a fish turning just beneath the surface of still water.
"You knew my father."
"Everyone in the organization knew Marcus St. Laurent. Brilliant mechanic. Terrible poker face." The fondness in his voice sounds real. That's what makes it dangerous. "I worked with him for two years before he took the assignment with Malachar. We were friends, Talia. As much as anyone can be friends in this business."
We've stopped walking. I'm not sure when. The corridor is empty in both directions, and I'm suddenly aware of how quiet it is. The gravity hum. The distant pulse of the station's systems. And Ethan, close enough that I can smell his cologne. Something clean and faintly sweet, like cedar, and underneath it, nothing. No sweat. No warmth. No human underscent. As if the cologne is covering an absence rather than supplementing a presence.
